Yesterday we headed off to Warehill EC (near Dunstable) to do a bit of dressage. Wasn’t the best day – very very hot, even at 09.30 when our test was. Dino isn’t great in heat (despite being half Andalusian? How does that work?? :laugh: ) and he was very unsettled about both the warm up arena and the test one. We got 57.82% which is a bit disappointing, but doubly so when Warehill have their own little championship event for which the qualifying score is 58%. I thought we had a good chance of making that really and was pretty frustrated that we missed it by such a small margin :rant: Not his fault at all and the judging was very fair….just….grrr.
I’m just uploading the video. Not our finest hour. His instinct when he’s unsure is to back right off and so I’m nagging him terribly just to keep him moving. 🙁 But it’s all good experience. We are hoping to take him out there again in September but the friend we went with needs to decided what classes she wants to do and we can see whether us doing the intro again works.
(as I publish this the video is still uploading!!)
As my friend was doing two classes after ours Dino had a lot of practice at standing about in the car park munching hay, which went fine for the first 3 hours or so but then he got bored and started trying to dig up the car park, so I had to untie him and bring him over to the picnic to give him something to think about:
This at least gave me the set up for an unusual head shot!
Good experience for him but way too hot really for either of us. Interesting to see if he’s better when we (hopefully) take him back next month. Once my other friends pony has recovered from having her shoes taken off we’re keen to do some arena hire in different places so he can see coloured poles, fillers and work on different surfaces.
Aww, I’ve just found Shona took a couple of snaps as well as the video. Not the greatest photo ever but I am super pleased with the subtle blingy browband!!
He was a bit freaked out by the photographer on the chair at first. Here we are having a chat.
